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Teaching the Savages How to Govern
Rodney King is not an educated man, but his plaintive cry in the middle of a Los Angeles riot,
Can’t we all just get along?
was freighted with wisdom far beyond book learning. I am reminded of my resolve to “get along” when I graduated from law school and became one of about 2,000 Indian `lawyers at the time in the entire country. I would never, I had told myself, sue another Indian or a tribal government. We receive enough harm from the dominant culture without adding to it among ourselves.
That resolve didn’t last ten years.
One of my early mentors, who was then acting as a tribal court judge for a number of Western tribes, found himself blackballed for ruling in favor of a citizen against his tribal government. That was apparently perceived as biting the hand that fed him, so several tribes quit feeding him.
In spite of his stellar qualifications, he found himself passed over in favor of white judges who were apparently more pliable. In my last sentence, I wrote “white.” Didn’t I really mean “non-Indian?” Yes, but after I came to a complete stop to ask myself if I made an error — and a racially insensitive one at that — it dawned on me once more how the nonsensical construction we call “race” permeates everything in these disunited states:
